"'The Short & Curlies' is a short film written and directed by Mike Leigh. It stars Alison Steadman, Wendy Nottingham, Sylvestra Le Touzel and David Thewlis. The short, 18 minute film, made after three weeks rehearsal, concerns a chatty hairdresser Betty (Alsion Steadman), her shy daughter, Charlene (Wendy Nottingham), and one of her customers, Joy (Sylvestra Le Touzel). Joy works in a chemist's shop and is chatted up by Clive (David Thewlis – in the first of his three Leigh roles). Romance ensues in a Thatcherite England, a great little watch for a sunny afternoon."

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Metro–Land, the 1973 BBC documentary was Sir John Betjeman's "gift to romanticise the mundane: in this case a tube ride from Baker Street to Amersham, celebrating the north–west London suburbs created by the Metropolitan Railway between 1910 and 1933. ...

'Metro–Land' was the advertising slogan developed to entice workers from cramped homes in Central London out into the rural paradise of Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. It was invented in 1915 by the Metropolitan Railway's in–house copywriter James Garland, who according to legend was ill with influenza and sprang out of bed when he thought of the term. ...

It was, of course, largely a con. The creation of Metro–Land destroyed the very thing – open countryside – which was used to advertise it. The speculative homes thrown up around the new stations bore few resemblances to the Tudor cottages depicted in the advertising materials: most were dreary semis, constructed at great haste and sold for as little as £400 each. Modern first–time buyers can only dream: that is equivalent to just £20,000 in today's money."